(Un)Faithful Renditions: Gender Dynamics in an Adaptation of Don Gil de las calzas verdes

Abstract

Recent stage versions of Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil de las calzas verdes have departed from traditional cape-and-sword approaches and experimented with psychological traits and gender ambiguities. Interestingly, these departures from canonical staging seem to occur more frequently among productions in English, as if translations served the liberating purpose of releasing tensions between texts and their original contexts, hence facilitating the process of adaptation. This article examines the process of adaptation for an upcoming New York production of Don Gil , written by Dave Dalton and subject of an ASTR Targeted Research Areas Grant. The new version, tentatively entitled Love’s a Bitch , approaches the material in terms of story and playability, as a paraphrase of the original, with the intention to foreground common human traits such as desire, jealousy, and deception in ways understandable and palatable for a contemporary general public unaware of early-modern Spanish conventions. Challenging monolithic views of authorship, text, and period accuracy, Love uses same-sex desire as an imperative way of “translating” social anxieties from early-modern times to the present.